The Aymara people in South America have a concept of time opposite to the rest of the us, so that the past lies ahead of them and the future behind, according to a study published yesterday.

"Until now, all the studied cultures and languages of the world - from European and Polynesian to Chinese, Japanese, Bantu and so on - have not only characterised time with properties of space, but also have all mapped the future as if it were in front.

"The Aymara case is the first documented to depart from the standard model," said Dr Rafael Nunez of the University of California, San Diego, who reports the finding in the journal Cognitive Science with Prof Eve Sweetser of the University of California.

The language of the Aymara, who live in the Andes highlands of Bolivia, Peru and Chile, has been noticed by Westerners since the earliest days of the Spanish conquest. A Jesuit wrote in the early 1600s that Aymara was particularly useful for abstract ideas, and in the 19th century it was dubbed the "language of Adam".

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/06/13/wandes13.xml&sSheet=/connected/2006/06/13/ixconn.html

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